I feel like this is an important lesson in life that I’m only recently starting to understand. Starting my clinical years as a medical student has really shown me that everything you need to learn, you need to learn by practice. This is a scary thought when there is so much to learn, meaning there’s so much to do. It’s incredibly daunting. I just want to run and hide away until I feel like I have accumulated all the knowledge that I will need to do what’s expected of me. But actually, the best way to gain knowledge is through experience. And experience doesn’t come from sitting in your room hiding behind a textbook, it comes from getting out and facing the world and all of the challenges lying ahead. Knowledge also comes from making a few mistakes every now and then. As terrifying as it seems, at the end of the day it still counts as experience - maybe some of the most important experiences you can have are making mistakes and learning to do things right for the next time.
But this doesn’t just apply to learning clinical skills for my future career, I think this quote applies to everything you do in life. Everything that is worth doing, we have to learn by doing it. You can’t read about how to play the piano and become a musical genius. It takes practice. Even the simplest things in life - like making friends, being in a relationship, trying to better yourself as a person. It all starts from making the first move and doing something. Obviously everything in life does require some kind of thought and reflection, but thinking and reflecting about the things you want or have to do in life won’t get you any closer to actually learning to do them. I feel like I spend too much precious time complaining or moaning about the things I need to do or want to do but never get around to doing. I talk and talk to my friends about all the benefits of doing more exercise and how I really need to start doing regular exercise again, yet if I don’t get out there and just do it how will I ever learn? That’s just one small example, there are millions of things that I say I want to do or wish I could do but I don’t make any active effort to actually change things and do what I want to. If I spent all the time I use up moaning and groaning about all the things I wish I could do and instead used that time to get out there and DO those things I imagine I would be much more fulfilled in life. And probably a much more interesting person.
